[Travalon]

so after fiddling and waiting for all my HDDs for my nas to arrive I am finally ready to make a permanent connection to my shares. I've searched and googled as well as looking at the freenas site, all I found was this:

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=NFS...NAS_7.x.29

I don't understand it. I thought I mounted a share in a folder and pointed xbmc to it. it's been working for a while but I have to remount every time I restart the computer. What is the proper way to connect xbmc to my nas?

Thx

[nickr]

There are two ways for XBMC to access an NFS share:

1. Use XBMC native NFS support - when you add a video source browse to the nfs share and set it as the video share; or

2. Get the OS to mount it to a place on your filesystem (eg /mnt/nfs_vids) and point your video source at that.

If you want the second sort to be mounted every time the computer starts up, you need to use the right entry in /etc/fstab on the XBMC machine.

[thethirdnut]

I'd recommend on the XBMC client to give autofs a look...works very well if you have issues getting fstab to work with NFS.

[Travalon]

I don't know what autofs or fstab are. Google here i come...

[nickr]

/etc fstab is the place where linux stores it's list of drives to mount, and where in the filesystem to mount them. Well documented on the net and via man.

autofs is some sort of automatic device mounting finagle which I don't know much about sorry.

[Travalon]

how would I edit my fstab to mount 192.68.2.69/mnt/media/movies to /travalon/home/movies on every boot?

for autofs I found this :
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter...autofs.htm

its confusing

[nickr]

fstab line (well documented on the net by the way)

//hostname/sharename /mount/point cifs credentials=/root/credentials 0 0

put your credentials in a file called /root/credentials and make that readable by root only. Tha file will contain two lines:

username=user
password=secretpassword

If your cifs share does not need a username and password you may ignore all the credentials stuff.

By the way if your internal IP numbers start 192.68 you are doing it wrong. Should be 192.168

[Travalon]

nichr,
Thank you. I had searched google before but came up m-t. You pointed me in the right direction and google did the rest. (explaining to me what you had already said). I didn't need to do anything with credentials but my shares now mount where I want them on start up. +1
other computer not so easy. where does the credentials file go? etc?

[un1versal]

My google spits easier things to understand, I asked google "autofs" and this was there https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Autofs

Not that any of this fstab or autofs is required anyway, xbmc can rbowse and mount properly configured NFS shares via libnfs

uNi

[nickr]

Travalon, I lost track of the fact you are using nfs and I gave a samba example. Never mind you got it sorted.

Can't see the point of autofs for a setup where you have a series of permanent mount points. Removable drives I can see the point (although xbmc seems to handle that).

Uni - one point about a permanent mount is that kernel nfs seems to be a whole lot more efficient than libnfs which xbmc uses. There is a recent thread with speed comparisons. Not too relevant at usual lan speeds/media rates, but certainly worthwhile in edge cases like wireless.

Then again we are all going to have to revise everything when 4K video becomes ubiquitous, just like we did when HD became popular.

[thethirdnut]

A lot of people have issues getting NFS mounts working properly in /etc/fstab and then others see horrible performance using libnfs.

Autofs solves both these issues and its very easy to use from the client side.

Code:

sudo apt-get install autofs

sudo vim /etc/auto.master
/mnt    /etc/auto.nfs

sudo vim /etc/auto.nfs
share1     -fstype=nfs4    192.168.X.Y:/share1                   NOTE: assuming use of NFSv4 server of course...use '-fstype=nfs' if v3 I believe.

sudo service autofs stop
sudo service autofs start

You do an 'ls /mnt/share1' and your NFS share will now show up and have full performance. That's it.